The look on Dushku’s face was priceless as Penikett whispered in her
ear. Whedon realized he couldn’t compete with what was happening
between his show’s stars.

“This is like bringing a banjo on stage after the Stones play,” he joked.

Whedon wasn’t giving up much in the way of “Dollhouse” plot points,
just as Ron Moore and David Eick, the executive producers of
“Battlestar Galactica,” talked only in very oblique ways about the
show’s last 10 episodes, which will arrive in January.

The only concrete thing Moore offered was a clue about who the final
Cylon is (one that, I think, closes off the possibility that the final
Cylon is a character who is yet to be born).

“It’s someone you’ve seen before,” Moore said. “It won’t be a guest
star, it will be somebody who has graced your television screen on our
program before.”

In the final set of episodes, there’s “a tremendous amount of upheaval”
and “things aren’t pretty” among the human survivors who’ve arrived on
Earth, Moore said. The dark tone of the last episodes will come as
“something of a shock” to devoted fans of the show, Moore joked. (Moore
talked more about the show’s last arc in this recent interview.)

Eick gave up one teaser about the last episodes. “Lee gets really fat this time,” he joked.

There was a lot of talk -- much of it emanating from the emcee, director, comic-book enthusiast and "Battlestar" fanatic Kevin Smith -- about how Katee Sackhoff’s character, Kara “Starbuck” Thrace, is a gay icon, a role model for women and a character who likes to always have the most guns. Sackhoff told a funny story about a scene in which she got to shoot two guns at once. During that action sequence, a director once told Penikett, who plays Helo on “Battlestar,” to stop “acting like a girl.”

Michael Trucco, who plays Starbuck’s husband, Sam Anders, was asked if he knew when he was first hired that he’d end up as a Cylon. No way, he said; he added that he’d won the “TV lottery.”

“People on the set didn’t know my first name,” let alone that he’d appear in more than the two or three he was originally contracted for.

Most people on the “Battlestar” set thought his first name was Steve, he joked.

Later, Penikett came out to defend his honor against Sackhoff’s claim that he acted “like a girl” in that previously mentioned action scene. He recalled it differently, saying that he’d been told to stop smiling so much as he fired his gun. That issue never got truly resolved, but Trucco jumped in the middle of the discussion: “Do you know my first name?” Trucco asked.

“Ted,” Penikett said.

In the discussion of their favorite individual moments from the show, many in the cast mentioned Galactica entering the atmostphere on New Caprica. Jamie Bamber (Lee Adama) cited the scene that pulled back from Galactica to Earth at the close of Season 3. Moore mentioned the Season 2 time jump – the moment when Baltar put his head on the desk and woke up one year later.

Eick recalled the Season 1 hand-to-hand combat between Starbuck and No. 6.

“They would not kiss, no matter how much we begged them,” Eick said of the scene.

Sackhoff said the joke on the “Battlestar” was that if the show wanted to increase its ratings, they’d re-do that scene but with Jello.

Asked if she ever wished she turned out to be a Cylon, Sackhoff said no. Playing a lot of different characters seemed like more work for cast members who were Cylons, she said.

The cast members present were asked what kind of closure their characters got at the end of the series. Sackhoff said that “Kara got peace, and that’s what I wanted for her.”

James Callis, who plays Gaius Baltar, said his character also got closure but “he could have had a few more affairs,” he joked.

Galactica Sitrep has more reports from the Comic-Con panel. And keep checking back at the scifi.com site; last year, they posted footage of the entire “Battlestar” session in San Diego.

Comments

I likewise went to that panel, and it was disappointing because of Kevin Smith's grandstanding. We heard a lot about how hot he thought Tricia Helfer was, how jealous he was of Baltar's womanizing and everything he thought, but not much from the panel. And I thought it was pretty bad that he only left 15 minutes for fan q&a, and even cut that little time short to offer his own opinion on the four questions that were asked.

Given that this is the last time we'll be seeing a Galactica panel while it's on the air, I wish he'd given more time over to people actually involved in Galactica.

So, I was listening to a talk show about energy production...how could this possibly tie into BSG... apparently there is a violent process for breaking oil and gas out of shale deposits. It is called Hydraulic Fracturing or Fracking for short! Trouble is they spell it Fracing. The pronounciation is fracking.:

What is fracing? When applied to stimulation of water, oil or gas wells, the objective of hydraulic fracturing is to increase the amount of exposure a well has to the surrounding formation and to provide a conductive channel through which the fluid can flow easily to the well. A hydraulic fracture is formed by pumping a fracturing fluid into the well bore at a rate sufficient to increase the pressure downhole to a value in excess of the fracture gradient of the formation rock. The pressure then causes the formation to crack which allows the fracturing fluid to enter and extend the crack further into the formation. In order to keep this fracture open after the injection stops, a solid proppant is added to the fracture fluid. The proppant, which is commonly a sieved round sand, is carried into the fracture. This sand is chosen to be higher in permeability than the surrounding formation and the propped hydraulic fracture then becomes a high permeability conduit through which the formation fluids can be produced back to the well. The fracture fluid can be any number of fluids, ranging from water to gels, foams, nitrogen, carbon dioxide or even air in some cases.

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